There wasn’t one, so they cut up a sheet.
‘I’ll have to buy a new bedspread as well,’ she said.
Mickie’s P&B magenta smoking jacket hung over a chair. Pendel delved, pulled out Mickie’s wallet and handed Ana a bunch of notes, enough for a new bed-spread and a good time.
‘How’s Marta,’ Ana asked, secreting the money in her bodice.
‘Just great,’ said Pendel heartily.
‘And your wife?’
‘Thank you, well too.’
To put the bandages round Mickie’s head they had to sit him in the wicker chair where Ana had sat. First they put towels over the chair, then Pendel turned Mickie over and Ana just made it to the lavatory in time, retching with the door open and one hand up in the air behind her and her fingers splayed in a gesture of refinement. While she was retching Pendel stooped to Mickie and remembered Spider again and giving him the kiss of life knowing that no amount of kissing was going to enliven him in any way, however much the guilty warders shouted at Pendel to bloody try harder, son.
But Spider had never been a friend on Mickie’s huge scale, or a first customer, or a prisoner of his father’s past, or Noriega’s prisoner of conscience, or had the conscience beaten out of him while he was inside. Spider had never been passed round the prison as new meat for the psychopaths to eat their fill of. Spider had gone loco because he was accustomed to screwing two girls a day and three on Sundays, and the prospect of five years without screwing a single girl looked like slow starvation to him. And Spider had strangled himself and messed himself and stuck his tongue out while he did it, which made the kiss of life even more ridiculous, whereas Mickie had obliterated himself, leaving one good side to him, if you ignored the blackened hole, and one really awful side that you couldn’t ignore any part of.
But as a cellmate and victim of Pendel’s betrayal, Mickie had all the stubbornness of his size. When Pendel got his hands under his armpits, Mickie just made himself heavier, and it took a huge heave on Pendel’s part to get him going, and another to prevent him from collapsing again when he was already halfway up. And it needed a lot of padding and bandaging before the two sides of his head looked anything like even. But somehow Pendel managed all of it, and when Ana returned he put her straight to work pinching Mickie’s nose so that he could wind the bandage above it and below it and leave Mickie room to breathe, which was as futile in its way as trying to make Spider breathe, but at least in Mickie’s case it had a purpose. And by running the bandages at a slant Pendel was also able to leave one eye clear for Mickie to see through, because Mickie, whatever he had done while he was pulling the trigger, had finished up with his remaining eye wide open and looking very startled indeed. So Pendel bandaged round it, and when he had done that he mustered Ana’s help to haul Mickie and the chair as far as the front door.
‘The people in my home town have got a real problem,’ Ana confided to him, evidently feeling a need for intimacy. ‘Their priest is a homo and they hate him, the priest in the next town fucks all the girls and they love him. Small towns, you get these human problems.’ She paused to catch her breath before renewing her exertions. ‘My old aunt is very strict. She wrote to the bishop complaining that priests who fuck aren’t proper priests.’ She laughed engagingly. ‘The bishop told her, “Try saying that to my flock and see what they do to you.” ‘
Pendel laughed too. ‘Sounds like a good bishop,’ he said.
‘Could you be a priest?’ she asked, shoving again. ‘My brother, he’s really religious. “Ana,” he says, “I think I’ll be a priest.” “You’re crazy,” I tell him. He’s never had a girl, that’s his problem. Maybe he’s homo.’
‘Lock the door after me and don’t open it till I come back,’ Pendel said. ‘Okay?’